The Political is Visual

The 2019 Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) Summer Seminar will explore the intersection of American visual culture, propaganda, and politics, broadly defined, in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Working with the extraordinary collections at the American Antiquarian Society (including prints, ephemera, cartoons, the illustrated press, and photography alongside printed and scribal texts), participants will explore how multiple forms of visual culture, ranging from canonical portraits to ubiquitous ephemera, both reflected and shaped political culture. Topics will include the American Revolution and the creation of the U.S. republic; pictorial representations of race and gender; images of political leadership; and the visual politics of war. The goals of the seminar are twofold: to help participants understand how diverse individuals leveraged visual culture to shape political debates and policies and to help them bring those insights to bear on their research and teaching.

The seminar will be held from Sunday, July 21, through Friday, July 26, 2019, at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. Participation is intended for college and university faculty as well as graduate students and museum professionals.

Faculty

The seminar leader will be Catherine E. Kelly, Editor of Books at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC) and affiliate professor of history at William & Mary. She is the author of Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America (2016).

Guest faculty will include Kenneth Cohen (Curator of American Culture and Politics, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution) and Scott Manning Stevens (Associate Professor and Director, Native American and Indigenous Studies; Associate Professor, English Department, Syracuse University)